Curriculum
Posted On May 26, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Every Child Matters
Purpose and aims of the Early Years Foundation Stage
Every child deserves the best possible start in life and support to fill their potential. A child’s experience in the early years has a major impact on their future life chances. A secure, safe and happy childhood is important in its own right, and it provides the foundation for children to make the most of their talents and abilities as they grow up. When parents choose to use early years services they want to know that provision will keep their children safe and help them to thrive. The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the framework that provides that assurance.
The early years foundation stage has been followed at Blossomtree since early 2008. The statutory framework and the foundation stage framework for children’s care, learning and development are followed at all times. We aim to follow the EYFS by helping the children to achieve the five every child matters outcomes of staying safe, being healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well being by:-
Setting the standards for the learning, development and care young children should experience when they are attending a setting outside their family home, ensuring that every child makes progress and that no child gets left behind.
Providing for equality of opportunity and anti-discriminatory practise and ensuring that every child is included and not disadvantaged because of ethnicity, culture or religion, home language, family background, learning difficulties or disabilities, gender or ability.
Creating the framework for partnership working between parents and professionals, and between all the settings that the child attends.
Improving quality and consistency in the early years sector through a universal set of
Standards which apply to all settings, ending the distinction between care and learning in the existing frameworks, and providing the basis for the inspection and regulation regime.
Laying a secure foundation for future learning through learning and development that is planned around the individual needs and interests of the child, and informed by the use of ongoing observational assessment.
The EYFS is centred around meeting children’s individual needs, which involves good planning practices. We have in place short, medium and long term plans which enable us to plan for children on an individual basis and to reflect on planning to ensure we are meeting their needs and to plan for their next steps.
Each keyworker is responsible for keeping a record of their key children’s development. This involves keeping observations, children’s work, pictures and anything else which is a reflection of their child’s development. This is all kept in a Learning Journey, which depicts exactly that, the learning journey that child takes during their stay at Blossom Tree. Each observation and piece of work is directly linked to the EYFS and tells us and parents/carers alike, exactly where their child is up to developmentally under the EYFS.
Our short term plans are done weekly and are based both around predictable interests from our medium term plans and from the children’s interests directly. As children change and are unpredictable, so plans are subject to much change. Short term plans are evaluated at the end of each week to see how we deviated from the plan according to the children’s wants and needs and what next steps we can take to extend their learning.
Our medium term plans are done for the whole year and are done by the Manager. They set out what we know children will be interested in over the course of the year, such as Christmas, holidays, seasonal change, wildlife, bonfire night etc and they set out opportunities for learning under these themes which would enable us to deliver the necessary aspects of the EYFS according to age. Each term has 2 sets of medium term plans each containing 3 topics so that topics can be looked at over a 2 week period. If however, there is something significant happening for the children at that time, or they express particular interests in new things, we will deviate from the plans to meet their interests, this is ensuring that we meet the individual needs of all children.
Also part of our medium term plans are overviews each term of where each child is at developmentally. There are 6 areas of the EYFS, which are as follows:
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Communication, Language and Literacy
Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy
Knowledge and Understanding of the World
Physical development
Creative development
At the end of each term we will complete an overview record of which stage each child is at in each of the 6 areas covered under the EYFS, this will then enable us to plan for the next term in order to help that child move on to the next level.
Please read the following 6 sheets which outline our medium term plans for the next 12 months.